Published in Windlesora 28 (2012)
©2012, WLHG
For many years a perennial question from residents and visitors has been ‘Why is there no museum in this important and historical town?‘ This would then be followed by a list of museums in less important towns in other parts of the country. This question will no longer be asked with the opening of Windsor & Royal Borough Museum at the Guildhall in March 2011. This year was the sixtieth anniversary of the opening of a museum in 1951 entitled The Guildhall Exhibition which was closed in 1982. This closure was followed by 29 years of struggle to re-establish a museum showing the history of the town, separate from that of the castle.
It is accepted that the beginning of this venture to have a museum was two years earlier when in 1949 there was an exhibition in the Guildhall entitled Bygone Windsor which was sponsored by the Windsor & Eton Society. The purpose of this exhibition was to interest people living in Windsor to know the history of their town and concentrated on the main developments in Windsor over the previous forty years. It included many pictures but also charters, old leases, documents and church ornaments. In this task, they had very practical help from many quarters. King George VI granted permission for a number of exhibits from the Royal Collection to be loaned including several works by the artist Paul Sandby which gave some idea of the town in the eighteenth century. The exhibition was so popular with the public that it was decided to plan for a permanent museum in the Guildhall.
In 1951 this plan came to fruition. This year was the 100th anniversary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 which was being celebrated nationally by the Festival of Britain and in Windsor by the re-opening of the Guildhall after a full refurbishment. It was planned as a small town museum showing its history and the first Honorary Curator was Maitland Underhill. Possessors of artefacts which could be worthily added to the collection were invited to get in touch with the Guildhall Committee and the exhibition organiser through the Town Clerk so there could be regular changes in the exhibition from the artefacts received. Again there were loans from the Royal Collection and there were implements from prehistoric times and an array of the industries and crafts up to modern times. On the first floor was a large display by The Middle Thames Natural History Society illustrating the wildlife of the area. The programme for visitors included details of the rooms on the first floor which they could visit as it was included in the price of admission.
An official handbook published by James Burr, the second Honorary Curator (1974-77), shows these plans for the museum were carried out. He lists exhibitions not in the 1951 programme and you can see these artefacts which are still part of the present museum collection. The Dyson Collection of items connected with the Volunteer Fire Brigade which was given in 1960 by Mrs Dyson is a good example. The Exhibition had no store except for an inconvenient area behind the display cases. There were forty small displays, two of which were changed each year making use of the small reserve collection and items loaned for the season.
By the late 1970s there was concern that the number of visitors was so low and it was decided to close the museum during the winter months to save money.
In 1976 Judith Hunter ran a course in connection with the local branch of the WEA entitled Discovering Your Town. Members attending were encouraged to do individual research. The result was the formation of Windsor Local History Publications Group (WLHPG) started by Judith and Gordon Cullingham to encourage research into the town’s history and publish the results, eventually, this led to the start of the annual publication of Windlesora.
In 1978 the WLHPG gave support for the start of a ‘friends‘ group, but this did not happen. It seems that the Council believed that renting out rooms in the Guildhall would be more profitable. The Windsor Guildhall Exhibition Committee of the Amenities and Leisure Committee of the Council was dissolved and shortly afterwards in 1982 the museum was closed and all items were stored in a small room in a Council Depot. This closedown was expected but still came as a great shock. The only positive happening at this time was the setting up of Madame Tussaud’s Royalty and Empire Exhibition in the Central Station. This included an exhibition of life in Victorian Windsor by Judith Hunter, the third Honorary Curator, which included the publication of her book about Victorian children in Windsor which could be used in the schools. The Borough helped financially in the setting up of this Victorian display and over three-quarters of the exhibits belonged to the borough.
The items in the museum store were now known as the Royal Borough Collection and in 1998 renamed as the Royal Borough Museum Collection.
Windsor was now joined with Maidenhead following local government reorganisation in 1974. Judith Hunter was determined that the collection was to survive and worked to persuade the Council to support The Collection with more space at the museum store. She organised open days, talks, and in 1986 the first annual exhibition in the Guildhall was held and continued each summer for over ten years. With the help of her husband Rip, these exhibitions were prepared and mounted in their home because of the lack of space at the store. She encouraged the store to be a centre for local residents, historians, authors, and researchers and a facility for helping other groups in the borough. Wednesday was advertised as the day for welcoming visitors. An education service was established giving talks to schools, loans of school boxes and displays in cases. Collaboration with the Maidenhead Heritage Group and its organiser Brian Boulter was very successful with benefits for both groups.
Judith Hunter was now employed for a whole day, instead of the previous half day, although she worked many more hours. Success for the campaign for more space came when the store was closed from July 1988 to December 1989 for enlargement including better storage facilities and space for an office as well as room for researchers.
In 1991 at a public meeting in Maidenhead Library it was decided to start a Friends organisation, which was to help Judith Hunter in her work. The Friends also made financial contributions when they purchased a number of display boards instead of having to borrow boards for displays. The first chairman of the friends was Sheila Banes Condy and there have been four chairmen to date, Norman Oxley, Beryl Hedges and Brigitte Mitchell. Membership grew with many individuals joining but also a number of corporate memberships including the Windsor and Eton Society, Windsor Local History Publications Group and Cox Green Local History Society. The Friends committee organised a programme which included a social evening, regular talks, visits, annual lectures held at various locations around the Borough including Maidenhead Town Hall, and a group of volunteers who met on a Wednesday mornings to help at the store.
The Borough Council became more involved with a monthly meeting at the museum store, first chaired by Sean Kearns the Borough Recreational and Arts Manager and later by Wilma Grant. The Mayor usually has a tour of the store, attends the AGM and the social evening. Judith Hunter was given an annual budget, Norman Oxley was employed for one day a week as assistant curator and Sue Peck became a part time designer for the Collection. Judith’s hours of employment were extended and there was financial help with exhibitions. A new Catalist computer programme became necessary to deal with the increased requests from researchers and finance was made available to complete the task. With the extra help the regular activities of open days, researches and exhibitions were expanded. The Collection was provisionally registered as a museum in 1992.
In 1995 the Town and Crown Exhibition was opened above the Information Centre at 24 High Street, Windsor. It was a tourist attraction by its very location. There was a professionally designed, permanent display in the larger of the two rooms and a smaller room for new exhibitions. John Fido volunteered to coordinate a series of displays, but it was difficult to maintain because it was under-resourced, with no staff on the spot to promote the exhibition to visitors. Despite some successful small exhibitions and popular activities for children organised from 2004 onwards, the exhibitions and the Information Centre were all withdrawn when the council sold the end of the lease in 2006.
Moving out of Town & Crown. On the left: Volunteers removing the model of ‘The Innkeeper’s Daughter‘ from the stairs in the main room. She now greets visitors at the Guildhall. On the right: Every item had to be checked against the paperwork as it was removed from its case.
Meanwhile the successes of the 1990s had brought more problems of space and facilities however, and in 1999 there was a campaign for re-housing the collection. The Parish Church in High Street, the dungeons next to the Star and Garter and the old Magistrates Court were all explored as possible locations. In July 1999 the Council announced that they were undertaking a review of all authority property within the borough to find alternative premises. In 1999 at a Town Forum in the Guildhall there was a large vocal attendance of residents to support Judith Hunter and Norman Oxley who put forward the case for more space, and the meeting had to be transferred to the Council Chamber to provide more accommodation.
In July 2000 there came the possibility for extra space in the upstairs rooms at the Council Depot which was double the size of the current downstairs area. This would have made possible a proper resource centre for local history research, education, storage, photography and graphics available for all organisations in the borough. At the local council elections, there was a change from a Liberal Democrat Council to one of No Overall Control and the proposal was not carried through. There was a feeling that this extra space would have been agreed if the local elections had not been postponed for a year from 1999 to 2000.
Judith retired in September 2000. The new curators Olivia Gooden (September 2000 to September 2003) and Caroline McCutcheon (January 2004 onwards) became employees of the council as Heritage Development Officers. Open Days and help from volunteers continued. Olivia achieved full registration for the museum in 2002 and worked with Reading Museum on a pilot project to develop loans boxes of artefacts to go out to schools, which Caroline, who was then seconded from Reading Museum later continued.
Meanwhile the search for more space was still a very high priority. A small area was offered for a museum in the newly-developed East Berkshire College, but this was turned down by the Friends’ Committee as too small and inappropriately located. A number of further premises were considered but they were either too expensive or needed major alterations. In 2006 when Brigitte Mitchell became Chairman of The Friends‘ she put forward the idea that they should buy a building to house the museum. They achieved charitable status, started fundraising and looking for a sponsor. Then plans were developed by the Council for a museum area upstairs in Windsor Library. Plans for the museum were to change yet again when the Conservatives made it their election pledge in Spring of 2009 to set up a museum in Windsor Guildhall. In their press release in April 2009, the Council wrote of their aim to create a family-friendly, educationally inspirational and interactive visitor attraction, telling the story of Windsor and settlements across the borough through exhibits and interactive touchscreen presentations with the Old Robe Room downstairs used for educational activities for school groups. This was ratified by the Cabinet of the new administration in late August 2009.
Eighteen months of exceptionally hard work then followed, undertaken by members of the Project Board, the Project Team and by a museum team at the museum store, including Margaret Kirby, Senior Manager Arts & Heritage, Caroline, an expanded volunteer team and two new part-time museum assistants Louisa Knight and Jon Iles. They collated the known history, undertook new research on the themes, produced object sheets, wrote text, sourced images, photographed and catalogued new acquisitions, and scripted and produced the audio recordings required by the designers of the museum, PLB. With some of the money The Friends raised they have been able to purchase items for the new museum and the fundraising will continue.
Three new Front-of-House museum staff: Cassandra Tavares, Amelia Evans and Lucy Ripper, together with around 60 new volunteer stewards were all recruited in February and the new museum opened its doors on 12 March 2011.
The new museum on the ground floor is now a fully operational, attractive and vibrant centre in the Guildhall, which attracted around 1,500 visitors in the first six months.
In 2009, Caroline and her manager Margaret had already achieved provisional accredited status for the museum, and this was upgraded to full status following an inspection in September 2011.
The museum will have its Official Opening in December 2011. Meanwhile Heritage Lottery Funding has been sought to transform the Old Robe Room into a learning space which would have delighted Judith Hunter.
We remember with gratitude, especially the work and inspiration of Maitland Underhill and Judith Hunter, who was awarded the MBE in the New Year’s Honours of 2004 for her Museum work in Windsor. Although Judith was terminally ill she attended the investiture at Buckingham Palace in March 2004, receiving her award from the Queen one month before her sad death. My thanks to Beryl Hedges, and Rip Hunter for their help and advice in preparing this short article and to Caroline McCutcheon for detailed information on the setting up of the Museum in the Guildhall.
Norman Oxley
Sources:
The Windsor and Eton Express
Minutes of the Friends of the Windsor & Royal Borough Museum
Files held in the Museum Store
Windsor Local History Group 